by Libba Bray
“Maybe the historians weren’t looking in the right places,” Memphis said. At Henry’s quizzical expression, Memphis added, “I mean, who cares what a bunch of Diviners have to say?”
The phone rang again. “Good morning, Diviners Investigations,” Mabel said, her pencil ready.
“I am famished!” Alma announced. “I know a swell joint not far from here. Anybody else hungry?” She looked at Ling.
Ling reached for her crutches. “I’m always hungry.”
Alma smiled brightly. “Miss Chan, you are going to eat like a queen today. Do you like pork?”
“I’m half Chinese,” Ling said, as if that should settle it.
“I better shove off, too,” Memphis said.
Theta came and stood by his side as he put on his coat and wrapped the scarf she’d given him as a Christmas present around his neck. “Hey,” Theta said, smiling shyly.
“Hey,” Memphis said back without smiling.
“Nice scarf.”
Memphis said nothing.
“I saw that Langston Hughes is giving a reading up at City College,” Theta tried. “I thought maybe we could go if—”
“I’m busy,” Memphis said.
“Memphis…” Theta started.
“Isaiah’s waiting. ’Scuse me,” Memphis said, brushing past her.
Theta looked to Henry, who came and hugged her. She felt like crying but she couldn’t. Not yet. She still had to meet with Roy.
Theta had arranged to have lunch with Roy at a restaurant not too far from the theater. She’d wanted to be in a public place, where he couldn’t do anything to her. It had been a few days since his ultimatum, and she still hadn’t figured out what to say to Mr. Ziegfeld. She wished she could make it all go away.
When she saw Roy sitting at a table at the back, Theta’s stomach clenched. Slowly, she made her way to him. He stood up, pretending to be a gentleman, not for her sake but for everybody watching, Theta knew. Before he could help her into her chair, Theta sat down across the table from him and ordered a coffee, black, no food. She didn’t plan to stay long.
“Gee, you look pretty, Betty. Sorry—Theta. Can’t get used to that,” Roy said. “’Course, I woulda picked a different name, something that didn’t make you look so highfalutin odd, but you probably didn’t give it much thought.”
Theta hated how that little slap he’d attached to the compliment got to her. She pulled out her cigarettes. Roy scowled. “Ladies shouldn’t smoke.”
Theta wanted to smoke, though. Badly. She wanted to blow the smoke in Roy’s face. At the thought, her hands warmed. What if the fire sparked here in the restaurant and everybody saw? She put the cigarettes away and dropped her trembling hands to her lap, relieved when they cooled once more.
“You talk to Mr. Ziegfeld yet?” Roy asked.
“I been trying. He’s been busy with a new show,” Theta lied.
Roy glowered. “That’s why you need me as your manager. I’ll get him to pay attention,” he said, and Theta cringed, imagining Roy acting overly familiar with Mr. Ziegfeld, embarrassing her. “As it happens, I’m making a name for myself here already. I been working for Dutch Schultz. You heard of him?”
“The gangster?”
“Gangster,” Roy scoffed. “He’s a businessman. A real regular fella! He’s taking over some nightclubs up in Harlem. Gonna let me run one.”
“Oh. Harlem, huh.”
“The coloreds don’t know what they’re doing. Dutch is gonna set up shop. He just needs those high-hat Negroes like Papa Charles and Madame Sera-something outta the way first. That’s where we come in.”
“Whaddaya mean?” Theta asked, her heart racing.
“That ain’t your business. It’s man business. You just keep singing and dancing and get me that meeting with your boss.”
“Yeah. Sure, Roy.”
“I gotta do some business for Dutch. I’ll be in and outta town over the next week or so. And when I get back, you have that meeting set up for me. Okay? I sure would hate for Mr. Ziegfeld to find out some other way that you got a husband, Betty,” Roy said with a satisfied smile.
Every bit of Theta’s fire left her. She was so cold inside. Cold and dead.
That night, the Diviners went out on their first good lead. The owner of a former flophouse near the seaport that was scheduled for demolition called to say that his workers were too spooked to go inside anymore. They had heard strange crashes, thudding footsteps, and a woman’s crying, but they could never find the source of those noises. Tools would go missing, and later, they’d find those tools had been arranged neatly on the floor of a room where no one had been. Windows latched at day’s end would be wide open the following morning.
The Diviners entered the decaying house with flashlights blazing. It smelled of mold and urine and years of neglect. More than that, there was a great sadness to the house, a palpable storehouse of human misery. They traveled upstairs to the fourth floor, flashlights bouncing off the rotting floorboards.
“Feels cold,” Ling said in warning as they approached the last door on the right.
“Yeah,” Memphis said, watching his breath come out in a bluish puff.
Condensation freckled the tarnished brass doorknob.
“Ready?” Sam asked.
The others nodded. Sam pushed, and the door opened with a creak. Inside the narrow shell of a room hovered the ghost of a woman with disheveled hair and a dress that might’ve been in fashion forty years earlier. The dress bowed out around the middle, revealing her to be with child. A noose had been cinched at her neck, the ligature burns still bright along her broken skin. The rope hung down her side like a braid. At her feet was the winking image of a turned-over chair. She regarded the Diviners with a detached curiosity. Her eyes were dark. She had not turned. Yet.
“Have you come to help me rest?” she asked in a scratchy voice like a last dying gasp.
“Yes,” Evie managed, swallowing down her fear. “We have. But we must ask you some questions first.”
The ghost did not object. She clasped her hands. “I want to rest, but I am hungry, so hungry all the time, like a sickness, and I cannot find rest. It is the Eye. It won’t let me rest. I feel it burning in the dark of me.”
At the mention of the Eye, a tremor passed through the ghostly woman. Veins of rot climbed up one cheek. She shuddered as if with an acute pain.
“We gotta work fast,” Sam said.
“Where is the Eye?” Memphis asked.
The woman regained her composure. She smiled, ecstatic. “Resting in… in a field of… of gold. It shines like… like a promise. It is open! Oh, I would have its promises, for I am hungry!”
“Look,” Ling whispered to the others. The woman wavered between states: One minute, she was a lost soul, a shimmering, faded photograph of the human she must’ve been once. But the next, she had blurred into one of the terrifying dead, sniffing the air with blind hunger, teeth gnashing, eyes going icy.
Already, the Diviners were coming together, ready to tear her atoms apart. “Whatever you’re gonna ask, ask it now,” Memphis said, positioning himself slightly ahead of Isaiah to protect his brother. “I got a feeling we only have seconds left.”
“Where is Conor Flynn?” Evie demanded.
The woman was disintegrating before their eyes. “Would you not even know my name?”
“Where is Conor Flynn?” Evie repeated.
“He is among the dead. Safe for now in the wings of the caged one.”
“She’s answering in riddles,” Isaiah said.
An insect-like whine had arisen. A fly landed on the woman’s nose. Another crawled across her lips. “Hungry…”
“Wait! What keeps the Eye open?” Ling said. She squeezed Henry’s hand, ready.
But the woman was losing her battle. She bared her newly sharp teeth and answered with the plural voice of the hungry ones: “You do.”
With a bloodcurdling screech, she lunged forward, but the Diviners were ready for her. T
he room appeared to warp and bend inward. The tension created raised the hair on their arms and pulled hard at their back teeth, but then there was a release, followed by a sudden swoop of euphoria, and in the next second, the ghost was nothing but a few remaining sparkles of light.
It didn’t take long for reports to spring up of other Diviners joining the ghost-hunting fray. One of them, a psychic in Murray Hill, posed in her fern-laden parlor beside a crystal ball while holding up the supposed ectoplasm of a ghost she claimed to have caught “rummaging through my cupboards like a common criminal!”
“Ectoplasm my foot!” Sam groused. “That’s cheesecloth and some wet noodles. Big phony!”
“They’re trying to horn in on our act,” Henry said, folding up the newspaper. “There are ghost-hunting parties taking place. Well, they’re usually too blotto to do much, but it’s the principle.”
It seemed as if overnight, the Diviner business in town had shifted from “Sees all! Knows all!” to “Protects all!”
Racketeering, the mayor cried, and vowed to put any “Diviners, ghost hunters, or other disreputable types taking advantage of gullible New Yorkers” out of business. To make matters worse, Evie hadn’t been able to get Woody to accompany them on a mission ever since the night he’d staked out a supposedly haunted warehouse with them and it turned out to be raccoons in the walls.
“You know how long it took me to live that down in the newsroom, Sheba? Don’t answer—I still haven’t lived it down. Every day, some joker leaves me a little drawing of a ghost raccoon on my desk. My editor put the kibosh on the whole ghost angle. And anyway, I’m busy trying to hunt down leads on this Project Buffalo story whenever I can,” Woody said, lowering his voice.
“You mean when you aren’t gambling,” Evie complained.
Woody’s voice was a shrug. “I can do both.”
A few days later, Evie returned to the Winthrop spattered with mud after they’d chased down three ghosts in a moonlit field behind a filling station in Astoria. The expedition had left Evie exhausted and filthy, but also strangely giddy. There was something about the energy boost from exterminating the ghosts that felt good. Powerful. It made her want more.
As Evie approached the front desk, the night manager gave her a once-over before pasting on a smile. “Good evening, Miss O’Neill.”
“Good evening, Mr. Williams. I’ve been meaning to ask: Is it true that the Winthrop does not rent rooms to Negroes?”
Mr. Williams looked surprised. “Why, yes. That is our policy.”
“It’s a terrible policy. I’d like you to change it.”
“Why, Miss O’Neill, the Winthrop’s policy is only for the comfort of its patrons.”
“Well, gee, I’m a patron, and I’m uncomfortable with your policy,” Evie said.
The night manager was very polite. “I’ll alert Mr. Stevens to your concern, Miss O’Neill.”
“Yes. See that you do.” Evie sniffed and twirled her mud-splattered beaded handbag.
“There are two messages for you, Miss O’Neill.”
Evie smiled as she read through the first one, a letter from Jericho:
Dear Evie,
I hope this letter finds you well. There’s nothing much to report from my letter dated two days ago, except to say that I miss you two days more than I did then.
You really should see the rose garden here. It’s beautiful, like you.
Fondly,
Jericho
Evie smiled and tucked the letter into her brassiere until she could add it to the pile of Jericho letters in her underwear drawer. The second note was addressed Attention: Evangeline O’Neill. There was only one person who called her Evangeline, and Evie was already angry before she read Will’s message.
Please don’t make the same mistakes I did, Evangeline. I waited too long with Cornelius.
Come to me before it’s too late. Will.
Come to me. Like a command. Same old imperious Will. Evie tore up the note and tossed the pieces in the wastebasket.
When Evie arrived for her radio show the next evening, Mr. Phillips took her aside. “Evie. I’m not happy about this ghost business.”
“Oh, but Mr. Phillips! I’m simply trying to keep the city safe,” Evie said, batting her lashes, all innocence. “My intentions are good. Just like Miss Snow’s.”
“Yes, well,” Mr. Phillips grumbled. “Can you try to make the good seem less… unseemly? We don’t want to scare off your sponsor, remember.”
“Sure, Mr. Phillips,” Evie promised. But how did you make a very real threat seem like anything other than the danger it was?
On the air, Sweetheart Seer Evie kept everything light and breezy and entertaining, just like Mr. Phillips had asked. She helped people find missing family trinkets and reassured them that their lost relatives had truly loved them while they were alive. She told them what they wanted to hear, and they were happy for it. “May the good spirits look after you,” Evie intoned at the end of the show, blowing kisses to the audience as she exited the radio stage to warm applause. That bit she’d stolen from Sarah Snow. When Evie passed Sarah in the WGI dressing room, “God’s foot soldier on the radio” didn’t look pleased.
Sarah caught Evie’s eyes in the mirror as she pinned a fresh corsage to her dress. “The only spirit who can look after us is the Holy Spirit, Miss O’Neill.”
“Yes. But I understand he’s very, very busy,” Evie said through smiling teeth.
“Do you place yourself on par with the Almighty?”
“No. I’ll leave that to you,” Evie shot back. It was a misstep to bait Sarah like that, but Evie was tired of Sarah’s holier-than-thou routine.
Sarah looked at Evie like a judge from on high. “I do worry about what you and your kind might be unleashing on our nation.”
That goes both ways, Evie thought.
The very next morning, Harriet Henderson had a column devoted to Sarah Snow, complete with a staged photograph of Sarah surrounded by adoring children at an orphanage.
“I worry that Diviners play on people’s fears. You shout, ‘Ghost!’ and suddenly, people see ghosts,” Sarah was quoted as saying.
Hear, hear, Miss Snow, Harriet Henderson wrote. Perhaps it’s not ghosts who are the trouble but Diviners: For if there truly are restless spirits haunting the streets of New York, causing mischief and meaning us harm, how do we know it wasn’t these very Diviners who’ve brought them to us? Perhaps it isn’t ghosts we should be afraid of but Diviners themselves!
“Told you she doesn’t like you,” Mabel said, reading over Evie’s shoulder.
“It’s no time for smugness, Mabesie.”
“There’s always a little time for smugness,” Mabel said, shrugging on her coat. The phone was ringing again.
“Mabesie, could you…?”
Mabel gave a toss of her bobbed hair. “Believe it or not, I do have a life outside this room. Get it yourself.”
“Diviners Investigations,” Evie said, and scrabbled for a pencil.
That night, the Diviners were called first to a small hotel in the Theater District, where the ghost of a general sat at the white-clothed table in the private dining room. His uniform was splashed with blood spilled in some long-ago war.
“Why are the ghosts coming?” Ling asked.
“We come through the breach,” the general ghost said so emphatically his bushy sideburns puffed out with his cheeks. “It is unstable, though. Once the Eye is complete, it will be our time.”
“What can you tell us about the Eye?” Ling demanded. “Is it a place?”
“It is a great heart of gold humming with industry.”
“Is that where Conor is?”
“No. It’s where the others are.” The general’s eyes began to pearl. The rot of the grave bloomed on his lips, eating them down like acid.
“He’s starting to turn,” Memphis warned. “Get ready.”
A long exhale of curling black smoke poured from the general’s mouth on a guttural whine of a l
augh that stank of death. “He keeps you busy with his questions, doesn’t he?”
“What do you mean?” Ling asked. But it was too late. The general stood, drawing his sword from its scabbard. “I charged upon them in the field, and I would charge upon a thousand more, for I am hungry! Your days are numbered. The Eye will see to it. We are coming!”
“Now!” Sam commanded, and they watched as the general was torn from the world for good.
“Anybody else feel kinda… good after that?” Sam asked as they hurried to another ghost sighting, this one out in Green-Wood Cemetery.
“Like for just a minute you’ve plugged yourself into the sun?” Ling asked.
“Yes,” Henry agreed, and the others nodded.
“Memphis? You’re awfully quiet over there,” Sam said.
Memphis stole a glance at Theta. “Can’t a man be alone with his thoughts?”
“Sure. Except you’re not alone,” Sam said.
Don’t lie to yourselves: We’re all alone, Memphis wanted to shout back.
“I just want to get this done,” he said.
HARVEST SONG
He should’ve known it was doomed from the start, but Memphis had wanted to believe in miracles again, so he’d let himself fall straight toward the fist coming at his heart. A mangled mess lay behind his ribs now. He could scarcely breathe for the pain. Like he’d been torn from happiness in a trail of blood. The only emotion more powerful than the pain was his rage. His anger was a bullet shot indiscriminately, flying through space, in search of a target.
“Memphis, did you send in your application yet?” Mrs. Andrews had asked him the day before as he tried sneaking out of the library after dropping off his cache of books.
“No, ma’am. I forgot.”
“Again? Memphis!” she chided, shaking her head. “You’ll miss the deadline.”
“I suppose I will.” He hadn’t meant for it to come out the way it did. Mrs. Andrews raised an eyebrow at him.
“Sorry, Mrs. Andrews,” he said, ashamed.